De-quoting Tennis Quotes: ATP

WARNING: Certain de-quotations might be offensive to readers with a low tolerance for freedom of speech and to fanboys. If you want good, clean, wholesome fun, go to a Mormon picnic. This ain't the blog for you. 

Those damn bloody quotes. Everyone seems to like them. Let's find as much wisdom or truth in as brief an amount of words as we can - as if something truly intelligent and perceptive can be easily compressed into just one or two sentences. Usually it can't. Fortune-cookie profoundness is like chewing-gum: tastes great at the beginning but on closer scrutiny is a load of shit. But in the Age of Twitter, the Age of Illiteracy, half-assed "musings" are the opium of the asses.

Quotes, for some reason, get people's genitals wet. Sure, there are some one-liners and famous quotes that deserve their reputations, but most quotes are just so flawed, stupid or vague that it doesn't take a genius to de-quote them. Trouble is, most people are the complete opposite of genius, so who better for this dirty job than me?

Sure, some quotes are taken out of context, some reflect a temporary mood of a player, and some show a person's opinion from a decade ago which might have changed in the meantime. But who gives a hoot, right? They were said and that's all that matters, hence fair game.

This pointless list is the 4th entry in my "De-quoting Quotes" series. I've already done Mahatmah Gandhi, Pablo Picasso and Noam Chomsky, exposing them for the frauds and bullshit-artists they truly are or were. This tennis entry is a little different however. I am not de-quoting quotes that are necessarily legendary or even somewhat known (except among a few tennis fiends), but am this time merely commenting on some quotes I found on the internet. I have divided the tennis quotes into separate posts: one for ATP, one for WTA tennis. 

The text deals with ready-made quotes, meaning quotes I found on photos, because I know most of you would never "read" an article just with words and no nice colourful pictures. 

But the text also deals with quotes that I personally had to glue onto photos. These are nearly always the more interesting ones I had to stick onto photos myself because none of you "fans" deemed it necessary to do them yourselves: it seems most tennis fans prefer the dull, "wise", "educational" quotes, because most people are dull and, ironically, un-wise.

Obviously, most of the quotes I found and chose suck or are full of flaws and most I de-quote in the usual manner typical of this vile blog. What else can you expect from a de-quoter?

But enough gabbing. After all, this is an intro to quotes, and they are usually notoriously short. May the nit-picking commence. 

    

De-Quoting the Quotes: Men's Tennis

So is Bob saying he enjoys writing free verse or not? Putting the net down makes tennis easier, but does it make it more fun? 
And anyway, think about it: if lowering the net makes it easier for you to get the ball into the opponent's court - the same goes for your opponent. So nobody really wins. 
Hence Frosty is a jackass.

Tennis groupies really ought to know better. "Wham bam thank you ma'am" isn't a tennis thing, it is a mankind thing. 
Only inexperienced prostitutes such as this "unknown" whore could possibly expect a wedding ring after that first casual shag in the hotel room. Gold-digging with a tad too much optimism, are we?
(Sure, I know this is probably a fake quote.)

Man, Roger, you're so right. I'm great at educating fedtards about you not being GOAT. I teach that subject all the time! So glad I got your approval and your blessing to continue.

Now that Marat Safin has sold himself to Master Putin, overlord and owner of Russia, perhaps he finds it more easy to bullshit us.

 Perhaps he simply "forgot" that he grew up in a family of tennis coaches who owned a tennis club? It's tough to imagine a tennis club without a court or tennis balls, even in the USSR. He was one of the very rare privileged Soviet kids who had facilities to play tennis - and whenever he wanted.
 "Nobody to practice with"? Dementieva and Myskina belonged to the club as well. 
The reason he went to Spain as a teenager wasn't to get better facilities but to train on clay more which meant less strain on his knees - at least that's what he said back when he wasn't such a master bullshitter.

"That paid for everything I have now". Taken literally, he is speaking the truth. After all, his parents didn't give him the millions of dollars he earned as a tennis pro, but that's obviously not what he meant. He is trying to give himself a rags-to-riches kind of biography - especially useful in politics - which clearly isn't true.

 There is anyway an extremely low percentage of pros, especially ATP ones, who come from poorer backgrounds. The vast majority are from very affluent families, and the "poorest" among them stem from middle-class backgrounds.

 Does someone who comes from a humble background break dozens of rackets per year? No, that's typical behaviour of someone who had grown up not lacking anything, something that spilled over onto his on-court behaviour.

Usually when people say stuff like this, the opposite is true. They say it because people suspect - or know - the worst about them. Nobody in Russia joins up Putin's government in order to save the world, any moron should know that. They do it to get in on the massive robbery of the country's vast wealth. Safin just wanted a piece of the action, that's all.

Ilie Nastase was reported to have slept with almost 1,000 women, by his own accounts.

Several things wrong with this. (After all, it IS a lengthy quote.)

1. Pete, speak for yourself. For some players tennis is just a means to an end - to get money, to get laid, and especially to get famous. 
2. Given a choice between an attention-seeking egomaniac who is entertaining (McEnroe, Connors, to name a few) or a withdrawn, introverted, boring egomaniac (such as you, Petey), I will almost always go for the former variety of ego-trip lunatic. You bored the heck out of us for over a decade. I'd prefer you give us an apology rather than lament having to do interviews with dumb journalists and promo clips for Nike.
3. The only reason media chores were "more exhausting" than tennis itself for not-so-Sweet Pete is because he was a servebot who won matches without that much effort, firing aces and service winners left and right during an era when balls and courts were mostly very fast. Ask Thomas Muster if he thought the off-court chores were tougher than actual tennis: the guy had to actually WORK for his bread.

Can you tell I'm not a fan of Pete? Is it that obvious?

Thanks, Pete! It's so nice to know that you not only have no remorse about boring millions of people with your dull personality and servebot game, but you're even PROUD of it. Better yet, he's PROUD of being egotistical. That's narcissism taken to a whole other level. 
If every top player thought like Sampras and acted correspondingly, the ATP's fan-base would dwindle to about 5 people in just a few years. 
Great photo: he is sticking his tongue out to us. Just a notch less obscene than giving the fans the middle finger - which he does with these quotes. 
"I have no regrets that it was just a focus on me". Such a class act. It takes real character to not give a shit about the people who paid tickets to watch you.
Who the bloody hell would post this on the internet under the heading "Words of Wisdom"? No doubt some fanboy.
The only good thing about Pete is that he is a Republican. 

Rafa, trust me, fedtards remember defeats. Oh, and how they remember them. They obsess over them, they write essays on them, and they put together entire books of excuses about them.

Whoever wrote this nonsense doesn't know the first thing about tennis. The modern era is the antithesis of a specialist era. The specialist era was the 90s for example, when clay supremos could sometimes barely win a set at Wimbledon and when grass champs often lost in the early rounds at Roland Garros, a time when Top 10 serve-and-volleyers lost on clay to clay specialists ranked outside the top 50 on a regular basis. 
The current era, in fact, is the Homogenization Era, when most top players and even many top 100 players play similarly well on all surfaces. Homogenization of surfaces took place over a decade ago and it greatly benefited Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic in breaking almost all the records ever set in the Open Era. The Big 3 would have struggled mightily to won double-digit slam numbers if they had played in the 90s when surface variations and differences in ball-speeds were substantial. (Hence why only one player reached double digits, from the mid-80s all the way to the late 00s.)  
Without a speck of a doubt, only a clueless fedtard can be responsible for this insanely moronic statement.
One site claims Jimmy Connors said that. I find that hard to believe - unless he watches one match a year and is totally out of touch with modern tennis.

I am not 100% sure RF actually said this, but it wouldn't surprise me. The barely suppressed arrogance just oozes out of this statement. Federer is much like a politician; he carefully chooses his mostly politically-correct words. But every now and again, especially during press conferences when he is perhaps a little too tired to exercise self-control, the real Federer comes out - the narcissist with the huge Ego who actually does believe that he is the GOAT. Modesty is not part of Roger's character description. "No doubt they'll have a good CV afterwards" - what shameless pomposity. 
Not that fedtards EVER detect these little hints and clues about his real nature: they can barely read written lines, let alone read between the lines.

Have to agree with him on this one. The modern male has become a pussy-footed little softie, and these metrosexuals are nothing but little delta males incapable of defending a country when the shit hits the fan.
 Then again, Gulbis could be saying this because he's a notoriously - self-confessed - lazy bastard, and metrosexuality is nothing for lazy guys. I never comb my hair either. I understand him.

A surprising thing about these quotes is that I find myself agreeing with Gulbis more often than I should be. The buffoon has some common sense after all. Especially surprising is this statement (if honestly spoken) given his upper-class, jet-set background. Or maybe very rich people don't have a need to mingle with the plebs. They have enough money to create their own entertainment.

Hey, Pete, now you know how we felt watching your dull ass stroll around the court firing a bunch of aces and showing zero personality! I guess Pete, being bored and having no tennis to play professionally, had to look for other interests, but as most dull people, he discovered he has no other interests, no hobbies to pursue. Can you imagine being that wealthy, having that much time on your hands - and yet being bored?

Er, Rog, that goes for every player. Not just you. I certainly haven't seen any good players who plant their legs on the court like tree-trunks.

Believe it or not, Rafa did have a 6-1 H2H against Roger right after the 2006 FO finale.
I can't say for certain that I believe that Toni said this, but it does kind of sound like him. Essentially, Toni is using the typical Toni tactic of smothering Rafa's main rivals with politeness. "Kill 'em with kindness", a strange but sometimes effective tactic. Obviously, what Toni said is a blatant lie. To believe that Rafa's own uncle and coach would root less for Rafa than some kid in Australia would be asinine.

Well, Roger, you can't even become a father in the first place until you first get your husbandly duties done, right? 
Although, the fact that the couple have not one but two pairs of identical twins makes one suspect other forces being at work here, a third party. Hint hint nudge nudge say no more.

And this quote is just as dull as Edberg. The man incapable of being interesting either on or off the court.

Was this a joke or is he genuinely deluded/stupid? First off, having a wife is by no means proof of one's un-ugliness, considering that women, even hot women (especially hot Russian women), will marry a chair if it has millions in the bank. Besides, as far as I recall, his wife is nothing special - particularly for a Russian, and they are famous for their beauty. Arab sheikhs have many wives, and yet look how ugly these guys are. Secondly, it's far more likely he'll be considered "good-looking" (how can we even use this word a Nikolai context?) in China than Russia. Thirdly, he always looked to me as if he was 40 years old. He looks like an over-worked Welsh miner.

You mean by breaking your rackets and tanking a whole series of matches? Not to mention his connections with the Russian mob during his playing days, and a growing suspicion that he was involved in match-fixing with them. Marat is the last person who should be saying this.

Remember Uncle Toni's quote? It runs in the family, doesn't it. Rafa's modesty when talking about Federer is sometimes hard to listen to or read, but given a choice between an overly humble player and an arrogant egomaniac, I'll take the former any time. Obviously, this statement has little to do with reality, given that Rafa is 9-2 against Roger in slam matches, and that Roger did play "very good" (at the very least) in most of their matches.

This must be my favourite Federer quote ever - at least until I find a better one. It sums up neatly the massive hype and the hysterical adulation that RF started receiving from 2004 onwards. It also neatly defines the mind-set of a stereotypical fedtard and the typical dumb sports journalist. It's an atypical RF quote, in a way, because it shows modesty - admittedly in a joking manner.

At first I thought this quote was bogus, not because Tommy isn't an asshole (he might be), but because I know he is friends with Federer. But was he friends with him back in 2006? It turns out that this quote isn't bogus and was said in early 2006 when Courier, and many others, had been incessantly hyping RF to beat Sampras's slam record, and already calling Federer the greatest of all time. (Prematurely, as it turns out.) While I can understand Tommy on one hand, he really should never say anything bad about Jim because it's Courier's injury in a 1999 tour finale that gave Haas his first tournament trophy - after having choked in the previous three tour finales. If it weren't for Jim' injury, might Haas have become another Pioline or Nieminen? In any case, Courier responded by saying that players often say things they don't mean after a loss. The rest of the response is the next quote.

Of course, Courier didn't have yet the chance in 2006 to see how Rafa and Novak one by one unravel the Federer hype and reveal flaws in both the technical and mental aspects of his game. Now he would certainly not refer to Federer as the most complete player he's ever seen. That would be Novak, as most experts agree. That's why, for some quotes at least, it's important to know when they were stated.

Do Lleyton's legs count as two? In that case he missed the number by three, not by two.

No explanation needed.

Nick, age 7: listens to infantile "gangsta" rap. 
Nick, age 20: still listens to infantile "gangsta" rap. 
If Nick develops his game as quickly as he's developing mentally, we shouldn't have to worry about him winning a slam until he's well into his 50s.
OK, at least he isn't a little fat fuck anymore.

As far as that thing he said to Wawrinka during a 2015 match, it turned out that Stan didn't hear this comment about his girlfriend Donna Vekic during the match but found out about it after the match. It was reported that the two players "almost came to blows and needed to be separated". Translated into English: "Stan was about to sweep the floor with Nick, but the skinny Aussie punk was saved by people who separated them."

You gotta walk on egg-shells around these "tough", "macho" gangsta types. They're so sensitive, so delicate.  
"There, there, Nick, nobody hates baby. We all love baby Nick. Baby Nick, the hotel service shall soon be with you with your milk bottle. Now you be a good little baby and stick that pacifier into your mouth. In other words, shut the fuck up. Oops, sorry for the gangsta language. Oochie-goochie goo. Is that better? Baby not sulky-sulky?"

Everyone? Good thing he doesn't make sweeping statements about a tour that consists of hundreds of players. 
Where do I even start?

1. Whenever one of these has-beens complains about modern tennis you know it's only about one thing: they're not young anymore and they're not the center of attention anymore. Jealousy isn't just a female prerogative. It riles them that kids who were barely sperm back when they ruled the sports world are now collecting slams - not to mention making 100 times more money than they were. Nasty was one of the most desperate attention-seekers on the tour, a true exhibitionistic buffoon, and a major asshole who used gamesmanship to win matches.
2. The statement is as intellectual as one can expect from him. He starts off complaining about the way the game is played, but then goes into a different matter - the subject of "characters". He can't even stick to one subject. If you're gonna bitch about the modern tour, at least organize your arguments before you start sounding like a ranting miserable has-been fart. 
3. The strict rules now in place are a result precisely of assholes such as Mac, Connors and Nasty, the way they sometimes turned a sporting event into a ridiculous circus. So if Nasty wants someone to blame for the "dull tour", he can look at the mirror. What irony he'd mention precisely all the conniving assholes who brought about the overly strict rules of conduct we have nowadays.
4. As far as the tennis itself is concerned, I'd much rather watch Djokovic and Murray hit a ball cleanly and very fast than watch the ball go slower than a hippo's fart. 

Especially when 23,000 screaming fedtards are clapping on your missed first serves.
That's when you realize: "I am not like an animal, the crowds are."
Congratulation again to Novak for beating entire crowds time after time. That requires the kind of character and grit very few people can even come close to understanding. Hell, even I don't understand it. But I respect it.

He needs to apologize for the bad clown hair, the stupid facial expressions, and constant, infantile attention-seeking.
"Wasn't deserved for them"? Nick needs to go back to Sunday school. That's what you get when you grow up listening to rap music.

Now that's a typical Weak Era player talking. How is it that Nadal figured out how to beat Federer - and in their first match when Rafa was only 17 years old? On hardcourt, no less, in straight sets. Obviously, nobody has a flawless game. Except perhaps Novak Djokovic.

Why is this in the past tense? He thinks he can blame others for his losses now?
Not everyone agrees with Roger. Apparently, Federer never spoke to his fanatically devout fedtards on this subject. They never blamed a loss on Federer and still don't. They blame Roger's losses on... get ready: 

1. On PEDs - Rafa and Novak, more specifically.

2.  On mononucleosis, which fedtards affectionately refer to as "mono" (or because they don't know the full name?). According to many fedtards, he has had mono since 2008 and still does. When Roger used to win a slam title, the mono would have mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear just as bafflingly as soon as he lost another slam match.

3. On RF's "very old age".

4. On "very slow courts". According to fedtards, even Wimbledon's grass has become "extremely slow".

Why is Roger using the conditional here? Just the fact that he said this means he was and still is thinking that way. The H2H with Rafa, especially in slams when it counts most, kinda proves that.

Perhaps he doesn't consider playing Rafa "difficult moments"? What other explanation can there be? He's 11-23 against Rafa, 2-9 in slam matches. He has a 2-7 5-set score against the other guys from the Big 4, and he's been unable to beat either Rafa or Novak in a slam finale since 2007. OK, maybe he said this in 2008, before the two started dismantling his hyped GOAT facade.
He certainly couldn't NOT have been positive when playing the likes of Hewitt, Roddick or Gonzalez.

Any other player who's been on the tour for many years can say the exact same thing. Besides, when it comes to playing through pain and discomfort, Rafa is the man to talk on the subject, not the guy who never missed a slam since 1999.

Well, Roger, "early in your career" there wasn't surface homogenization. And early in your career was a stronger era than the Weak Era you ruled 2004-2007. That might, just might, have something to do with it as well as your improved form.

You know what? I think he must have said it during the Weak Era, and I bet he thought that 48 years at the top spot was doable. And who could blame him? In 2006 there was nobody to consistently challenge him on anything other than clay.

Pete isn't easily impressed, he claims - and yet, he is "in awe of" a meaningless little cockroach. Doesn't make much sense, but that's Pete for ya.

Sometimes I am inclined to say that sports "legends" should talk about non-sports subjects as little as possible. Nobody wants to know how shitty their taste in music is or what political views they hold.

I am 100% in agreement with this, aside from the "offended" part. Americans need to be offended more; they've become such pussies. What half-way intelligent individual isn't annoyed by imbecile celebs without high school diplomas offering solutions to world problems and telling you how to think? It is particularly annoying when athletes get political, like that mega-prick Marat Safin.

Of course, Pete needs to know that Eddie Vedder, of whom he is "in awe of", happens to be one of those know-it-all imbecile celebs who like to preach to people smarter than they are.
It's ironic that Sampras is a Republican voter. It's usually the smarter celeb voters who know that they aren't experts on world issues, whereas liberal celebs are the ones who - very ironically - think they know it all. When in fact they don't know shit.

Yet another Argentinian player complaining about being caught on PEDs. I'm surprised Lance Armstrong didn't come out accusing the ATP as well, considering how fashinable it is for every doper to blame them these days. 
And I love the "in my case" part. Translation: "The ATP were right about banning and punishing all the others they accused of doping because doping is not allowed, but in my case evidently they were wrong. Because I'm Guillermo Canas, that's why, and I should be allowed to dope."
If we were to believe all those ATP dopers, the ATP made a mistake every single time, and never caught a doper in the entire Open Era.

Says a guy who couldn't win one tournament for over a year after winning his 2nd slam title. Perhaps the motivation magically evaporated after the Wimbledon title? Apparently, motivation is a relative concept and for some players it has a very short expiry date. Ivan Lendl felt that "motivation" and left Andy's team soon after Murray won Wimbledon.

It's pretty obvious why Pete is beatifying this rivalry in such wonderful "prose", and not Andre. Just look at their H2H in slams: 6-3 for Sampras, and more importantly 4-1 in slam finals. He loved having Agassi as his most frequent rival, because Andre had his shorts full every time he stepped onto the court against Sampras.
Admittedly, it couldn't have been easy for Agassi and his fairly average serve in the era of fast courts and fast balls. If these two had played in the modern era, I am convinced that H2H would have been a lot more equal. 

How do you know I didn't place the quote on this picture myself? Because I'd never type in just two full stops instead of one or three. I love internet illiteracy, it's great, isn't it. 
Rafa discovered the fear of losing in 2015, and that's why he is no longer a contender for slam titles. I wonder when he stated this, though.

He is right, in a sense. However, we don't want a bunch of emotionless robots either. I am not saying players should behave like that imbecile Nick Kyrgios or manipulate opponents, referees and crowds like Ilie Nastase did, but if Jim has Federer, Edberg and Sampras in mind as perfect examples of sportsmanship, he completely misses the point of pro sports: it does have to be entertaining first-and-foremost. If the players are morally flawless but utterly dull, of what use is that?
Not that Sampras, Federer or Edberg are morally flawless, far from it. I was just using examples of very dull personalities - on court.

Hear that, Roger Federer? It is enough to reach your "highest standards". The opponent's name is irrelevant, except perhaps when he goes by the name of Rafa and he's playing his best. Or Novak.

Didn't he say this after he lost a slam match?
I would love to believe him, but I am not sure I can. He is partly to blame himself for my skepticism, because he'd built such a clean-cut, overly polished perception of himself in the public, aided by his corporate PR machine and the pro-RF media. He talks like a diplomat far too often, reminding me not infrequently of a calculated, sly politician. 
Federer is highly intelligent and has proven on several occasions that he doesn't mind misusing the obedient fedtarded media to manipulate tennis fans. 
Having said that, I don't doubt that he enjoys himself on the court. He is, after all, a megalomaniac with pathologically high ambitions (I mean, who continues torturing their body with high-demand physical exertion AFTER winning a record number of slams?). Who but a pathological egomaniac would prance around a grass court with a white jacket, impersonating tennis royalty? But whether that "joy of playing" is enough to make him continue even if he thought he couldn't win another slam - I highly doubt it. Even artists and musicians are in it for the money, most of the time and most of them, let alone athletes.

Yes, Mats, most "sports is about balls" and there are very few "champions without balls". In fact, you won't even find 1st round Challenger event losers without balls. Kinda hard to play without them. If anyone else had said this, I would know he was being tongue-in-cheek about balls, but not Mats: he would actually talk about testicles and forget that tennis balls are the same word.

While I do agree that some Latin players play quite dull, Gulbis has this narrow-minded view of tennis as being a macho competition of which player gets to hit the ball harder - as if blasting every ball as hard as you can, like Azarenka, for example, is everything tennis is about. Kinda ironic, because he thinks women's tennis is only about ball-pushing, and yet he plays just like Vika and a few other bombers. Women's tennis was slow and moon-ball-like - back in the 80s and for much of the 90s, but it changed. I always like a little chauvinism now and again because it's such a refreshing change from the monotonous political-correctness started by the likes of Federer, but he is being too simplistic about it.

For a more detailed explanation, including Pam Shriver's idiotic reply, go to the De-quoting Tennis Quotes: WTA post.

The misconception here seems to be that being introverted and not being an attention whore on the court automatically equates to "not being a jerk". Sampras is a jerk. You don't have to throw rackets around and scream at the umpires to be a jerk. Boring jerks exist too. Pete has proved that with the multitude of jerky things he'd said throughout his career.

Hear that, fedtards? Roger doesn't just sit on his ass rarely practicing, as a lot of you dimwits seem to think. You actually believe that Rafa works all the time whereas Roger's talent is enough to get him through to slam finales, and that Federer just takes it easy, sipping cups of coffee at the French Riviera while his main rivals sweat it out on the practice courts like a bunch of "idiots". Fedtards, they understand pro sports so little.

I am fairly certain this quote is from the previous decade, maybe even as early as 2007. By 2011, at the latest, tennis had become a lot bigger thing in Serbia than it previously was, largely due to Novak, and to a lesser extent thanks to Ivanovic and Jankovic whose careers at the very top were too brief by comparison. I can confirm this from personal experience because suddenly there were more tennis clubs and yet it was tougher to book an hour in many places.

Of course he is right about the will to win, the fighting mentality and all that. However, to say that all the players in the top 100 are of similar potential is nonsense. I have seen Novak practice in 2009, watched him several times, and watched many other top 100 guys practice and the difference is quite noticeable - in terms of technique, let alone willpower and the rest. The way he hits the balls is head-and-shoulders above players who never make the top 10.

Got that, fedtards? Contrary to what the more clueless among you think, Novak isn't a ball-pusher. Not SABRing your way to the net like a desperate aged veteran isn't a sign of technical weakness, it's a point of strength. Being secure in your baseline game means not having to storm the net all the time like a panicky chicken.

Sereno Williams should love this statement, or what?

The problem with this vapid PC statement is the "small matter" of deciding who plays on what tour. Do Fish or any other "diversity"-spouting left-wing imbeciles have the answers to that? Of course not: they're too busy throwing around idealistic speeches that mean absolutely squat in the real world.
One would think that with real problems going on in the world and society, that the last thing we should give a fuck about is whether trannies pick up rackets to play tennis or not.  
Besides which, exactly which American law forbids LGBT members to play the game? If anything, these bizarre demographics are as protected as the spotted owl. Everything seems to revolve around these tiny sexual minorities - one of many ways cultural Marxism (aka political correctness) has us all brainwashed in increasing numbers. Fish is talking out of his ass, his is farting hogwash out of his mouth just to sound politically correct. Listening to this jackass, one would think that tennis is suffering because hordes of LGBT people are being "excluded" from playing tennis: and that's the biggest load of shit I've heard in a very long time.

It's ass-kissing media whores such as Fish that give even obsequiousness a bad name. Yes, Mardy, lick the Master's ass. If that's what it takes to ensure a career as a sports commentator or journalist despite the fact that you're dumb and boring, you go for it, girl.
Would it surprise anyone that Mardy has a reputation among tennis fans as one of the biggest assholes on the ATP tour? It's usually the biggest dicks and phonies who embrace the path of least resistance.

Whenever a millionaire, jet-set gambler, friend of Russian mobsters and groupie-fucker says he doesn't need or love money, you know that bullshit oozes out of his mouth. But when one of Putin's politician's says that, it becomes unintentional buffoonery.

No comment necessary. Marat explained it "himself" so wonderfully.

The hedonistic egomaniac in Safin is always ready to share his latent sociopathy.

Don't you feel safe in the knowledge that Russia's Duma has uneducated, hedonistic buffoons such as Marat Safin voting on decisions that might affect the whole world?

I am kidding of course. We all know that Putin makes all the decisions there, while Safin and his Duma pals are simply a bunch of well-paid clowns whose only purpose is to try not be seen picking their noses when cameras are filming.

Tennis is best watched and played. Golf though? Best ignored, and occasionally mocked. 
I love these clowns who compare golf with actual sports: especially tennis. It's one of the most exhausting, demanding, physical sports out there, and golf is just fat guys and nerds strolling in a park dressed in fancy-shmancy gay clothes, while cocaine-sniffing yuppie crowds wait ten minutes for them to hit a ball. 
I have no clue who Roger Kahn is, but it's a safe bet that he was born a moron and lives like a moron.

Except to perhaps at least reach a finale at Roland Garros, the physically most demanding slam? Pete hasn't proven much on clay, winning only one M1000 event on clay and reaching one SF at the French Open. Impressive results, but hardly the stuff of legend. 
And while we're at it, how about proving you can win a big event without heavily relying on your serve to get your error-prone ass out of tough spots? How about successive 10+shot baseline rallies that you actually win against the likes of Agassi? Unfortunately for Pete's opponents, his one dull ace counted as much as their baseline winners.

Sure, it's easy to snicker a bit at this quote with the benefit of hindsight. Pete couldn't possibly know that only a few years later he would be topped by Federer, then Nadal and it seems most likely Djokovic as well. 
With the amount of running and consistency required in modern tennis due to slower courts and balls, Pete would have had a lot to prove. He benefited from being born a decade earlier than the Big 3, otherwise as part of their generation, I don't see him winning any slams.
And you gotta love the lack of modesty. Pete loved to boast in the most humourless, pompous way.

That's why I've always argued that the serve shouldn't be as dominant as it is. Certainly its dominance started growing in the mid-80s with changing racket technology and then exploded in the 90s, giving dull servebots a chance to win a lot, but due to slower courts and slower balls that trend has been reversed to some extent. 
And yet, there are clueless, insane creatures such as fedtards who think we should go back to quick courts again - just so Federer can win more slams (as if 17 somehow isn't enough). 
The serve is the only shot in tennis which 100% depends on the server and not on the opponent - that's what Tsonga is saying. As such, its influence needs to be made as small as possible, because it's a pity that guys like Nalbandian with a great game but a weak serve need to work a lot harder for their points and money than the likes of Isner.

This is true of course - at least the first sentence. As for why he stopped playing, he was 31 years old. That might be the (much) bigger reason.

Your opponent also had to play in those humid conditions - unless of course you played a tennis match via Facebook and he was in Stockholm. As for defending, if you attacked more you wouldn't have to run and defend as much.

More will be added!

Women's Tennis De-quoted:

http://vjetropev.blogspot.rs/2016/02/de-quoting-tennis-quotes-wta.html

Pablo Picasso De-quoted:

http://vjetropev.blogspot.rs/2013/06/pablo-picasso-man-quotes.html

Mahatma Gandhi De-quoted:

http://vjetropev.blogspot.rs/2013/05/gandhi-re-quoted.html

Noam Chomsky De-quoted: 

http://morepoliticalrants.blogspot.com/2013/11/noam-chomsky-professional-liar.html